Hmm, stark differences - pro-lifers ultimate goal is to protect a life that had no choice in it's creation from the very beginnng of that life.same sex marriage supporters ltimate goal is the abolition ofmarriage and the acceptance of any and every relationship as equal to every other relationship.

Hmmm . . . Which position is destructive and which one is supportive? Hmmm . . .

But Brent, you are correct, we in the Homosexual Conspiracy, in association with the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and the Elders of Zion, are merely pressing this marriage thing as a way to destroy the (admittedly threadbare and moth-eaten) moral fabric of your society. Our ultimate goal is to get the abortion rate up to near 100% so that we can use the fetal blood to both bake our matzos and dye our stiletto drag pumps.

"But Brent, you are correct, we in the Homosexual Conspiracy, in association with the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group and the Elders of Zion, are merely pressing this marriage thing as a way to destroy the (admittedly threadbare and moth-eaten) moral fabric of your society. Our ultimate goal is to get the abortion rate up to near 100% so that we can use the fetal blood to both bake our matzos and dye our stiletto drag pumps."

I bet you'd be in favor of abortion if you could prenatally determine that your child was going to be a faggot.

For the record, I wouldn't. I think homosexuality is natural. What bothers me is the modern day smugness and self righteousness of the modern day gay. In fact, I have it on second hand information one of my kids may well be gay. It's his life, and he is what he is, and I love him regardless.

To me, what's going on with this gay marriage thing is not about "equal rights." It's about getting something without paying the dues.

I don't find the religious arguments very compelling, but I do find the argument that marriage is a naturally occurring solution to social and human problems quite compelling. That religions have been the vessels carrying this institution to me is immaterial.

And no one has explained to me adequately why gays ought to care except for the benefits. It's pretty clear gays don't care much for what society thinks.

Abortionists should well fear the fetal heart-beat movement. Time is not on their side as science marches on back down the time-line to conception. Not there yet, but it increasingly looks as if Michelangelo was more scientifically right than many knew when he brushed his spiritually-inspired vision "The Touch" onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel..

"I bet you'd be in favor of abortion if you could prenatally determine that your child was going to be a faggot."

Honest to dawg... the people who would abort gay babies, if there was a test for gay babies, are the exact same people who currently abort for Downs or sex selection or because she doesn't want to be fat in the summer or have her life disrupted.

The problem with brain activity for a starting point (that was an interesting article) is that it can be *brain activity* or someone can try to say it's *conscious thought*.

The danger in a definition other than simple brain activity (I believe that the article said 5 weeks) is that there is a danger of deciding who, among those alive, doesn't have brain activity that counts. So far we're pretty clear on brain death, but there really are people pushing for euthanasia for handicapped people, if they figure someone is handicapped *enough*.

Not so sure I wouldn't include myself among y'all, Freeman. Though getting government out of the equation is probably impossible given the governments intrest in child formation for economic growth and the tax aspect that is also part of that same public-policy thrust.

Never been much of a joiner, but I'm another one. That said, I think Obama and the Left are manipulating and using the Gay ( struggling for a term here because Pal says there isn'ta "Gay Community") Mobilized Collective Will for reasons that have nothing to do with civil rights.

Five. But the fly in the ointment with quote getting the government out of the marriage business unquote, is that the government still pays to clean up the messes made by people who mate stupidly, and so has an interest in encouraging people not to mate stupidly. I wish that the government did neither--picked winners nor was responsible for the losers. I wish that people could make their choices and then be 100% responsible for their outcomes, positive or negative.

If we didn't have a giant welfare state providing the human results of stupid mating with just enough lousy food and Xbox to keep them from roaming the streets in feral packs--maybe then the Church could do its job again and actually care for the needy, and we could stop using the power of the state to define the family and the norms for mating.

I'd go for brain activity instead of heartbeat because it offers a better parallel to how we define death.

Amen!

It's interesting how our brain does not control our heart. It has a little independent motor that runs on its own power. Your heart starts beating and circulating blood before you have any brain activity at all.

It's also kind of freaky how we have dead people whose hearts are still beating. Mary Roach writes about it in her wonderful book, Stiff.

Thanks for the link, Inga! Although there were such howlers in that article that it made me doubt everything he had to say.

This is the same age at which the Supreme Court has ruled that the fetus becomes protected from abortion.

What I would like to see is some kind of study on why normal people feel this odd desire to twist and rationalize the Supreme Court's work in order to make it morally acceptable. Are you that desperate for authority figures? Did you somehow miss the discussion of dismemberment and decapitation in Carhart I and Carhart II?

This is in the New York Times! The paper of record.

"...the Supreme Court has ruled that the fetus becomes protected from abortion."

And Stalin didn't kill anybody.

It's such a spectacular stupid thing to say. And I'm sure he believes it.

Insty linked yesterday to an analysis of an article by one Samuel H. Lipuma in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, (38: 190–204, 2013), where the author argued that Continuous Sedation until Death (CSD) "is the permanent elimination of consciousness from a patient. To have one’s consciousness permanently eliminated is to die. It is a death of higher brain functioning." Note, this isn't the same as brain death; really, it's just being unconscious.

Wesley Smith, the analyst, thinks the proposed redefinition has several long-term goals, including:

* Making the value of human life subjectively depend on quality of neurological function. e.g., “personhood theory;”* Allowing the profoundly cognitively disabled to be organ harvested before biological death, in essence killing for organs;* Allowing experimentation on living human bodies under the pretext that they are mere cadavers;* Stopping all medical care, as now happens with those declared dead, to save resources.

It's interesting that a move to extend the legal definition of personhood at one of life's termini, using biological factors, is occurring at the same as a move to shorten the legal definition at the other.

If I say I have a complaint about SSM activists with ulterior motives, I would hope you know I am not talking about you or even gay people in particular. I am referring only to SSM activists, who may or may not be gay, some of whom have ulterior motives, and are not being forthcoming. Am I paranoid for thinking such people exist? Perhaps. But the tactics used by some activists, such as the use of the bigotry label to denigrate those who oppose based on religious beliefs, and seeing references to all the "decent people" supporting SSM, led me to where I am.

I know where you stand on the issue. I too would prefer govt. not be involved in marriage. I just don't know if it is possible.

It took quite a few years for popular opinion to start turning against largely unrestricted abortion.

Wonder if the same thing could happen with regard to a Constitutional amendment to restrict marriage to one man and one woman? Especially if SSM opens the floodgates, and we start seeing major clamoring for polygamy, etc.

However, the track record of both liberals and the history of the SSM in particular should be a very clear lesson that you can't take the SSM advocacy at face value.

It might not be a trojan horse/bait-n-switch campaign...but I am willing to bet all my material possessions against all yours (whomever wants to take the bet) that the SSM agenda doesn't stop at federally-recognized marriage.

I could just ask you and see if you responded, but I'll go ahead and list them:

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

So pro-life is covered.

But I don't see marriage covered there at all.

Any right not inalienable must come from one of two sources:

1) Enumerated rights. If it isn't listed in the US Constitution or its Amendments, it isn't a guaranteed right, and should be left up to the states to decide.

2) Common Law inherited from England (pretty much the Magna Carta and equivalent accepted traditional rights).

If SSM were being enacted via popular votes or legislatures, without demonizing opponents as bigots or violating the rights of opponents in an attempt to bully and terrorize people into acquiescing, you wouldn't hear a peep of opposition about SSM from me.

But that isn't the world we live in.

I don't trust the "Ends Justify the Means" crowd for anything. They have fully embraced dishonesty and brutality to get what they want. Their successes are poison fruit.

Traditions aren't always right. But they are always there for a reason. Prudence in change is always the best option.

Broomhandle, good point. We do have a weird dynamic in which on one hand the gov't needs to encourage healthy families (or at least be seen as doing so) and on the other has to have a steady supply of unhealthy families so as to justify employing armies of bureaucrats to administer the various responsive programs.

Basta, organ donors are on life support as they are wheeled into the OR to "harvest" organs. Some people erroneously believe there is a "pulling of the plug" and cessation of life beforehand. Although there IS brain death.

Stopping all medical care, as now happens with those declared dead, to save resources.

I think that's one of the goals of abortion, too, actually.

To a socialist, a baby is a welfare recepient. She needs food. She needs shelter. It's all outgo. There's no income from a baby. A baby's not going to work, or pay taxes.

From the point of view of the socialist, a baby is a drain on resources.

Indeed, a baby keeps a lot of women out of the workplace. Mom stays at home to take care of baby. So baby won't be paying taxes, and now mom won't be paying taxes, either.

Socialists define a baby as a bundle of costs. Babies impoverish people. Babies make you poor. This is how they think!

No doubt you think I'm exaggerating. Am I? Take a peek at Justice Blackmun's dissent in Beal v. Doe.

He describes poverty as a "cancer." It's as if Blackmun is thinking of our society as one giant body. (And the state is the brain who's in charge of the body!) And our body is being attacked by a cancer.

Poor people are the cancer.

And of course his solution for the cancer is to cut them out. Abort the children of the poor and make the cancer disappear.

the cost of a nontherapeutic abortion is far less than the cost of maternity care and delivery

Abortion cheap! Baby expensive!

and holds no comparison whatsoever with the welfare costs that will burden the State for the new indigents and their support in the long, long years ahead.

Why do socialists insist on free birth control? Of all the things to run on! Why free birth control?

They want to keep us from reproducing. Or, more specifically, they want to keep us from reproducing inferior babies. A baby from a 16-year-old is an inferior baby. An unwanted baby is an inferior baby. All these babies are going to be costs to our society. And these costs need to be reduced.

Harry Blackmun is arguing for free abortions. And he is telling us why. You people are a cancer! You must be removed!

“In his book Rethinking Life and Death (1995) Singer notes that following the Harvard Brain Death Committee report published in 1968, most countries have adopted brain death as an acceptable criterion for declaring a person legally dead. He also notes that this event transpired with virtually no opposition despite its ground-breaking nature. What is less widely known, Singer points out, is that this ‘redefinition’ coincided historically with the advent of organ transplantation.

Singer … points out that it is simply not true that all brain function necessarily ceases with brain death – for instance, pituitary function often continues for some time after formal criteria for brain death are met.”

Of course, being Singer, he “takes the position that brain dead individuals are still alive, but that organ harvesting from these individuals is none the less acceptable. His position is that rather than employ artificial, contrived, or bogus definitions of death, we should recognize that the only intellectually honest course is to admit that all lives are not equally valuable and that some lives are indeed in such a degraded and hopeless state that even though they are technically ‘alive,’ it is still ethically acceptable to utilize their organs for transplantation.”

Well, I guess you've got to give him points for cutting through the bullshit.

The danger in a definition other than simple brain activity (I believe that the article said 5 weeks) is that there is a danger of deciding who, among those alive, doesn't have brain activity that counts

And I'd think any measurement of brain activity would be so subjective that you could get one case where it could be killed just because of how a doctor interpreted some kind of scan, and another case with roughly the same level of brain activity where it gets Secret Service protection just because Obama chose him to be Vice President.

Basta, organ donors are on life support as they are wheeled into the OR to "harvest" organs. Some people erroneously believe there is a "pulling of the plug" and cessation of life beforehand. Although there IS brain death.

The problem with heartbeat, as I see it, is that it's just a pump. We already have artificial hearts. The heart is machine-like, and can be replaced by a machine. And you can take one out and put in a replacement.

You can't do a brain transplant. What makes us human, what makes us alive, what makes us an individual, is our brain. And for people who believe in souls, clearly our soul resides in our brain. In fact it seems to me that brain activity/brain death coincides with Thomas Aquinas and his ensoulment theory.

Conception is when your body comes into being. But brain activity is when your life, your soul, first makes its appearance. And when brain activity stops, we accept this as death, even though your body is still there. Your soul has passed on. Your life has gone.

I happen to like brain activity, although of course there is always the possibility that doctors make a mistake about when you die. But if a state wants to go back to heartbeat, that's fine, too. The point I would like to stress is that we should apply our laws to everybody. Defining the baby as sub-human property, as outside our law, that's what drives me up the wall.

Too many people assume the Supreme Court made a good faith attempt to define and protect the baby's life.(See New York Times article that Inga linked to at 8:28). How can you do that while simultaneously defining the baby as property?

"We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins." You can't get more clear than that! The baby's life is irrelevant. Thus viability is meaningless. The critical point has always been birth. That's when the Supreme Court is prepared to recognize your humanity, and your right to life.

"...the Supreme Court has ruled that the fetus becomes protected from abortion."

Just how wrong is the paper of record? How many viable babies have been aborted? No one knows for sure. I'll throw out the number 600,000, which is an educated guess.

Where did I get that number?

The Guttmacher Institute (which is affiliated with Planned Parenthood, the largest abortion provider in our country) says that 1.5% of abortions take place after 21 weeks. Or roughly 900,000.

How many of that number are viable?

The youngest baby to survive in a neonatal care unit was at 21 weeks and 6 days. Note the mother had to lie to the doctors to get her baby into a NICU. Doctors routinely allow very premature babies to die and make no attempt to keep them alive, even against the wishes of the parents.

And note also that abortion increases your risk of future premature births. So on top of the 900,000 abortions done after 21 weeks, we might add a good number of preemies who are left gasping for air.

So we don't actually know how many viable babies have died from Roe v. Wade. My 600,000 number might be too high or too low. And there's no way of getting an accurate count, when doctors assume non-viability and make no attempt to keep babies alive.

Indeed, there's profit to be had in aborting viable babies. Doctors can charge more money (see Dr. Gosnell's practice), and then turn around and sell the baby parts to medical researchers.

"I should say cessation of breathing and heartbeat, not life."--------------------------

"The problem with heartbeat, as I see it, is that it's just a pump. We already have artificial hearts. The heart is machine-like, and can be replaced by a machine. And you can take one out and put in a replacement.

You can't do a brain transplant. What makes us human, what makes us alive, what makes us an individual, is our brain. And for people who believe in souls, clearly our soul resides in our brain. In fact it seems to me that brain activity/brain death coincides with Thomas Aquinas and his ensoulment theory.

Conception is when your body comes into being. But brain activity is when your life, your soul, first makes its appearance. And when brain activity stops, we accept this as death, even though your body is still there. Your soul has passed on. Your life has gone."

... in favor of removing the government from the definition and regulation of marriage."

Interesting. Easy to say, now lets qualify it. Are you all also in favor of giving up the fiscal benefits government accords those married, including potentially those same sex unions if "marriage" definition is expanded to include them? Then expanded further in the name of "equality" before the law?

Or would you prefer that government remain in THATaspect of "marriage" and continue the discrimination it entails?

Don't misunderstand me...I am not saying the discriminatory benefits are not justifiable. I AM saying that if you expand a protected group enough eventually no one is protected, so to speak. The minuscule number of gays and lesbians who will actually commit to "marriage" may not tip the balance...yet. Other "committed" couples, groups, etc. will next apply for the same dispensation.

Soon enough, the protection will vanish. And government will treat everyone as individuals, period.

Oh, no, one protected group will remain...the institutionalized government bureaucracy ... aka "the party" ... it is only the general public masses that will be purely individuals.

I was speaking of how "they" might/will treat "you" and "me" ... e.g., as equally responsible for sponsorship of teh partay.

There'd be no basis for "affirmative action" when all individuals are classified as "the same" ...no individual worthy of consideration above the others, except for the collective leadership people.

You see, such things as affirmative action, tax deductions, exemptions, and so forth are government responses, aimed to serve government interest and perpetuation, to political actions by groups of interested parties. When the group approaches everyone, there will be no political response to mitigate...and we'll all be the same ...NIRVANA!!

And instead of jacking up married peoples taxes to match that of singles, we reduce the singles rate to match that of married couples once we get govt out of marriage. The only side that should have to take the tax hit is the government side.

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